[danso]

The two students also shared "nearly 100 identical lines of code". The `!done` was the icing on the cake.

[parennoob]

Good point! I missed that and focused on the emphasized Boolean test, which is the first time I have seen any code in the NYTimes.

[danso]

Trivia point: One of the co-authors of the piece, Jeremy Merrill, is a programmer-journalist at the Times (and previously at ProPublica); I imagine he helped with the code:

https://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/upton-a-web-scraping-f...

http://jeremybmerrill.com/blog/2016/01/flyover.html

http://jeremybmerrill.com/clips/2013/05/updating-dollars-for...

[emmelaich]

Oddly, it's not the `!done` that is the problem, it's the `boolean done = true`. Which should be `false`